[UPDATED with details on latest strikes] Yesterday, President Obama ordered humanitarian airdrops to Iraqi refugees and authorized — but did not actually launch — airstrikes on Islamic State forces threatening either the refugees or Erbil, the capital of quasi-independent Kurdistan. This morning, at 6:45 am Washington time, the other shoe dropped, in the form of 500-pound smart bombs […]
[UPDATED 2:10 pm with comment from President Obama & Pentagon spokesman Kirby] Western media are hardly going easy on Russia. But in all the often-excellent coverage I’ve read so far of the Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 disaster – which claimed 295 lives – no one* is pointing out two basic facts that point towards Russia and […]
On today’s battlefield, mobility isn’t optional - it’s mission-critical.
UPDATED: Adds FYDP Budget Plans To Spend $1.65 Billion On New Air Force One WASHINGTON: Airbus, Boeing’s only likely competitor, probably won’t bid on the new Air Force One even though the Presidential Aircraft Replacement program has reappeared in the 2015 budget. “Airbus could put together a dramatic candidate for Air Force One,” Allan McArtor, the […]
WASHINGTON: In a speech that demonstrated just how important SIGINT really is, President Obama issued a new policy directive today that essentially says, we’ll be more careful in the future about containing leaks, making allies mad at us and giving American’s reason to think we might be violating their privacy. Perhaps most importantly, the new […]
UPDATED: Lockheed Now Plans 2,400 Furloughs After DoD Decides To Bring Back Civilian Workers (10/7 at 12:45 p.m) WASHINGTON: OK. That headline is deliberately provocative. But here’s the evidence. The president of the United States cancels an important trip to Asia — including the first visit by a president to the increasingly powerful state of […]
WASHINGTON: When Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh meets with President Obama at the White House this Friday, the rise of China may not be on the official agenda, but it will be on everybody’s mind – and Beijing will be watching warily. Friday’s meeting will be just the latest in a series of summits that […]
Balancing security and access to data are critical to providing users with trustworthy, reliable data for real-time decisions.
WASHINGTON: As House Speaker John Boehner went to the White House for fruitless talks on sequestration, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon convened reporters to tell both the President and his own party leadership, “we are done cutting our defense.” But the very fact that McKeon had to send this message via the media […]
WASHINGTON: Tomorrow morning, overshadowed by sequestration, the House Armed Services Committee will hold a rare full-committee hearing on a topic that would normally be high-profile, even explosive: whether to give the Defense Department, and especially its elite special operators, broader legal authority to work with foreign forces worldwide, from Colombia to Mali to the Philippines. […]
UPDATED: Added Grim Assessment By Todd Harrison of CSBA WASHINGTON: Hope springs eternal, even here in the nation’s capital. After the election, both President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner made nice noises. And many pundits hailed this, believing either that sequestration would get kicked down the road a fur piece or a Simpson-Bowles’ grand […]
Breaking Defense commissioned this article from the CEO of the Truman National Security Project, Rachel Kleinfeld, to help prod both the GOP and Democrats into some vigorous and open discussion about national security issues. You may hate the ideas expressed here or love them, but we think you’ll react to them — which is the […]
Partnerships with outside industry are a cornerstone of the kingdom’s ambitious growth strategy.
As the Senate reconvenes to debate the cybersecurity bill, President Obama himself has set the stakes in terms of preventing a future catastrophic attack. But some say the real and present danger is what’s happening under our noses right now, in an online theft of intellectual property that Cyber Command chief Gen. Keith Alexander called […]